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San Diego has so much to offer
we have a healthy lifestyle,
we have a beautiful coastline,
we have a climate that allows for year round growing conditions,
access to the ocean for inspiration
for exercise, for product.
All this influences who we are as a restaurant.
What we're striving for at California Modern is to give a sense of the San Diego experience through food.
And to distill living in this environment to a story that is told on the plate.
Some of the chefs I respect the most are those that channel to some extent their natural environment.
not only by harvesting local ingredients,
but, also
inspiring the
actual menu.
We're in a sunny, healthy coastal
place in the food should speak to that.
We have access to incredible produce.
We have local growers like Chino Farms, Crow's Pass,
Specialty Produce. We get great seafood locally
from Catalina Offshore
Pacific Shellfish, and Chesapeake Seafood.
Our long-standing relationships with these suppliers allow us to explore
ingredients that are here locally.
San Diego has a great deal of wild items that grow around us,
and that we're just starting to understand.
through a filming that I did with Adam Zimmern for Bizzare Foods America
I met a neighbor of mine, Chris Ahrens, who's a surf journalist and
makes a hobby of knowing what's edible
in our local environment.
And we're just starting to explore local foraging and
how it influences what we do here at California Modern.
Our core belief
is that one ingredient should take center stage.
So our approach
heightens the main ingredient
that we're working with and sometimes that means keeping it really simple
and sometimes,
that means manipulating it to show off the best qualities, either by the
way we work with the ingredient
or by other ingredients that we had to heighten the flavor or the texture.
If you think of carrots,
we treat the carrots in a different way
and really make the carrots the focal point of the dish...
if they're that spectacular.
Carrots are kind of the ubiquitous vegetable that gets put onto a lot of different plates, as a side item.
that's what we do you with all of our dishes.
We focus on one or two ingredients that are really at their peak
When we create a new dish for the menu we challenge ourselves on four key values:
Number one
What's the story of the dish?
What's the background or the inspiration?
Is the message clear?
Number two does it give a sense of place?
When you taste it, does it taste like the San Diego lifestyle?
Number three, does it give a sense of time?
Is it seasonal?
There are dishes that work
in the summer not in the winter not because the ingredients, but because those
are dishes that you prefer to eat when the climate's warm.
And number four, is the dish balanced in texture and flavor, and are those flavors focused and intense.
We have three ways of dining in California Modern.
At the upper end of the spectrum is Table 3 (TBL3)
which is a 14-course tasting menu that is available on limited nights.
It's really a culinary journey that
gives a sense of what we're trying to do and
explore in terms of
telling the San Diego story through food.
The second tier is a six-course tasting menu that's available every night
and it's a smaller version of the TBL3 experience
and then we have the a la carte menu which is ten appetizers and ten entrees.
Of course none of this means anything if we fall short on the rest of the experience
with all the energy, effort, thought that we put into our food — we put the same energy into the environment,
where its consumed,
and the service that helps guide the experience along.
The view that we have from the restaurant is really a constant reminder of where we are
how fortunate we are to be here in Southern California.
And, without sounding too mystical, it's a constant reminder of the endless possibilities that are available to us.